• A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
• Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
• Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
• Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
• It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
• Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
• Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
• Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith [but] they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
• Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest...
• The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
• The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
• There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
• We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
• Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, oh, do you learn.
